Ayumi Hamasaki turned down a record deal as fishy and became Japan's top-selling solo act
When a producer approached a teenage dropout at a Tokyo nightclub and offered her a singing career, she said no way; the whole thing sounded fishy. Max Matsuura kept asking. Ayumi Hamasaki eventually agreed, and she went on to sell more than fifty million records in Japan.
Hamasaki was born in Fukuoka on October 2, 1978, and grew up without siblings in a household run by her mother and grandmother. From age seven she modelled for local businesses to help pay the bills, and at fourteen she moved alone to Tokyo to sign with a modelling agency. She released a little-noticed rap EP under the name Ayumi in 1995, acted on television, and dropped out of school in tenth grade.
Matsuura, head of the label Avex, first heard her sing at the Velfarre club. She skipped most of the voice lessons he arranged because they felt like school, so he sent her to New York for three months of private coaching. Shy about speaking her mind, she wrote him letters, and the producer liked her prose so much that he asked her to write lyrics. That habit shaped her career: fans later credited her success to words they found honest and relatable.
Her debut single Poker Face came out on April 8, 1998, and the first album, A Song for ××, spent five weeks at the top of the Oricon chart. The third album, Duty, sold close to three million, and the 2001 compilation A Best passed four million. For a time she brought in over 40% of Avex's income. After the September 11 attacks she reworked the album I Am..., recasting its cover and themes around faith and peace.
Records followed: 38 number-one singles, more than any other woman in Japan, 25 of them consecutive, plus a chart-topping album every year for thirteen years. Across Asia she is called the Empress of Pop.
Source: Ayumi Hamasaki
